Simply beautiful…
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All the images shown below were taken using Autochrome Lumière technology. It’s an early color photography process, patented in 1903 and invented by the famous French Auguste and Louis Lumière, populary known as Lumière Brothers. They were the earliest filmmakers in history.
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Good article, a variant on “you didn’t build that,” but with an explanation of why government investment seeds the way, and how private investment can’t do it.
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At every stage, the innovation economy depends on sources of funding decoupled from concern for economic return. As economists have long recognized, such funding will not be delivered by competitive markets. Only an active state in pursuit of politically legitimate missions — national development, national security, conquering disease — can play the required role.
Thus, from the Erie Canal to the Internet by way of the transcontinental railroads and the Interstate Highway System, the American state has played a strategic role in the deployment of the transformational technologies that have created a succession of “new economies.” In disregard of this history, forces have been at work for a generation to delegitimize the state as an economic actor — even as the next new economy can already be defined in broad strokes.
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Government cannot play the role either of entrepreneur or venture capitalist in creating the low-carbon economy. But entrepreneurs and venture capitalists cannot build this new economy by themselves.
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Great article.
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“If you are not in this conversation in the next two or three years, you are going to be increasingly less relevant to the buying public. Because it’s a mega-movement, not a trend, that is moving up the food chain and the age chain. The younger you are and the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to understand it. All types of corporations are going to figure it out or be left in the dust.”
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So many responses to Aaron Swartz’s untimely death by suicide (many posted to Twitter and/or Facebook), and here is the EFF’s piece, bookmarked to Diigo.
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The CFAA’s vague language, broad reach, and harsh punishments combine to create a powerful weapon for overeager prosecutors to unleash on people they don’t like. Aaron was facing the possibility of decades in prison for accessing the MIT network and downloading academic papers as part of his activism work for open access to knowledge. No prosecutor should have tools to threaten to end someone’s freedom for such actions, but the CFAA helped to make that fate a realistic fear for Aaron.

Aaron was a powerful force for change, and he would still be working toward that goal if he were here. His memory should challenge us to make the Internet, the law, and the world better. One place to start is the CFAA.
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A wonderful article about Viktor Frankl, the pursuit of happiness, and the importance of a meaningful life.
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[Viktor Frankl:] “Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is.”

Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves — by devoting our lives to “giving” rather than “taking” — we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.
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Such a good point…
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The AR-15 shows how guns have become gadgets, thanks to technological change and an army of fanboys connected over the Internet. It’s a military weapon in the hands of civilians, so exquisitely designed that it might as well have been invented in Cupertino by Apple. It’s the iPhone 5 of guns, only instead of an app ecosystem, it has an ecosystem of parts and ammunition designed to make it as effective as possible.
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It seems every major city (and some not-so-major ones) has a catalog of nightmare plans like this. Here’s one for NYC:
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There have been some epically bad plans for New York City over the years, like drying up the rivers, building an underground city, and encasing Midtown in a bubble.
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Read on…

Interesting survey and critique of the self-help category.
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Still, just because there’s plenty to criticize doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty that’s worthwhile, too. As Gretchen Rubin points out, all branches of knowledge have their quacks: “When you have your astronomy, then you get your astrology—and we have our own astrologers in this neck of the woods.” Nonetheless, “the greatest minds throughout history have thought about things like self-knowledge and self-control and how to live a good life. I don’t know why it’s now branded as snake-oil stuff.” Even the most over-the-top books offer a real benefit: they encourage the virtue of self-examination. To read self-help is to take stock of one’s self and to ask what kind of life one wants to lead.

These are profound issues, and what the genre’s critics sometimes miss, too, is that self-help readers are well equipped to explore them. That’s because the people who buy these books are, like all book buyers, “pretty comfortable,” says John Duff of Penguin. “It’s going to be that middle-class person, reasonably well-educated” and in “very rarefied” company, as “our market for all books is really very limited. Most people stop reading when they leave school.” Those who don’t stop probably have their acts together. Call it the paradox of self-help. “The type of person who values self-control and self-improvement is the type of person who would seek more of it in a self-help book,” Whelan says. “So it’s not the unemployed crazy lady sitting on the couch eating potato chips who reads self-help. It’s the educated, affluent, probably fairly successful person who wants to better themselves.”
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Phillips adds, “Apple and Exxon combined only made a bit more than $82 billion in profits during their most recent full reporting years.”

It’s weird, but it’s how it’s done: “…the Fed buys US government bonds, the US government pays the Fed tens of billions of dollars in interest payments, and the Fed then turns around and pays that money back to the Treasury.”

Meanwhile, back in pundit-land, we’re treated to what Jonathan Chait brilliantly analyzes as the meme of a “right-thinking sentiment,” which assumes that the two major parties in Washington can’t come together to solve problems, viz. the debt problem (see his Jan.8 article, The Eternal Folly of the Bipartisan Debt Fetish).

Chait agrees that the debt is a problem worth solving, but he balks at how it has hijacked punditry and what we see as politics.

I don’t have anything to contribute here, except to say that the complexity of how Federal Reserve profits are (a) made (read the article) and (b) transferred back to the government makes me think that all the political posturing around The Debt and how “the government” should learn to budget “like householders do” is baloney. Obviously, a government budget is not a family household budget. (If it were, where’s my Federal Reserve handing over its profits to my Treasury?)

Chait in turn nails the pundits for ignoring far more pressing issues. Like unemployment. And the environment (climate change). In this article,, he writes:

I consider the long-term deficit a problem worth solving, though I would argue that mass unemployment and, especially, climate change are more urgent problems. I would like to know the case to the contrary, but if there is an argument for elevating the deficit above those priorities, I am not aware of it. Overt argument is not the preferred style of respectable centrist pundits. It is too rude.

And so, when figures like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are invited on to programs like Meet the Press, they are treated as disinterested wise men rather than political advocates. The host, David Gregory, asks them to hand down rulings on politicians. He does not question their own ideas. (Notably, the Sunday talk shows, a haven of right-thinking, deficit-obsessed centrism, have given over little attention to climate change in the last four years and have not quoted a single climate scientist during the entire span.)

So, we have everyone focused on the debt and on “the fiscal cliff” (which, in the run-up to January 1, 2013, seemed on par with Y2K, another dud), while we ignore climate change and employment/wages. We’re focused on a near-chimerical Federal budget (which we claim has qualities resembling our own household budgets, even though that’s laughable) as we ignore real household budgets and ecological budgets. Great.

But Chait goes deeper and further, pointing out that manufactured despair over the Federal budget is making mincemeat of real political debate. We’re devolving to pablum, and he blames the centrist, right-thinking pundits who dominate the discourse via television and print:

That the two parties must meet in the center and agree on a deficit plan is something that respectable people repeat to each other so often it becomes obviously, uncontroversially true.

Obama seems co-opted by this meme to the point where he seems incapable of advocating a more trenchant position. And yet, the meme continues, with more and more calls for “meeting in the center.”

Resilience is the new (actually, old) black.
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As cities prepare for climate change in earnest, they’re going to need to harden infrastructure, change building patterns, and overhaul government emergency procedures. But they’re also going to have to put a greater value on the human connections that can be found in walkable neighborhoods where people know each other and support local businesses. It’s not just about quality of life. It’s about survival.
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Being a “Lebenskuenstler” (life artist) is hard, regardless of technology (and sometimes because of it)…
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The authors conclude that telecommuting has not permeated the American workplace, and where it has become commonly used, it is not very helpful in reducing work-family conflicts. Instead, it appears to have allowed employers to impose longer workdays, facilitating workers’ needs to add hours to the standard workweek.
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